New Red and Orange Line Cars

KentXie said:
I think you misunderstood. It's the lack of funding that likely contributed to the fact that they didn't buy new vehicles to replace their current fleet that is over 40 years old earlier. As a result, a battery explodes and now you have this bruhaha over having to run vehicles on their last legs.

LA is replacing their current fleet which are all under 30 years old. This gives them more leeway to test and troubleshoot their new rolling stock because their current stock is still serviceable and there's less pressure to immediately take them out of service.

My point is, there is a lot of things the MBTA is at fault for. This isn't one of them. You can blame the shitty ass elected officials and the folks from central and western mass who do not want their taxes going into public transit
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Yes. The #12 cars (01200-01300 series) never had a proper mid-life rebuilding. Somewhere around the late-00s, early-10s they refreshed them somewhat; they definitely got new paint and possibly some roof work done, though I don't know if they did any significant body work and they certainly didn't rebuild the guts of those things. While they're a good decade-plus younger than the #1 Red Line (01500 and 01600 series) cars, they've actually been in service longer without a proper rebuild, and it shows.

That is on the T, and it's on successive state governments whose indifference and cheapness presumably played a role. The Red Line got partial fleet supplementation and rebuilds, the Orange Line got zilch. For whatever reasons, they completely whiffed on a decision to rebuild-or-replace the 01200s until the point came that a rebuild wouldn't be cost effective, necessitating full-scale fleet replacement that left us at the mercy of the new cars (which, to be fair, is the exact same thing the Blue Line had to deal with fifteen or so years ago). I don't completely let the T off the hook; there was once upon a time talk of supplementing the OL fleet with retired #4 cars from the Blue Line, until it turned out that they were too corroded to be useful. To the extent that that plan might have disrupted consideration of rebuilding-or-replacing the OL fleet, that's on the T, though potentially mitigated by funding shortfalls if they were essentially forced into "use these or do nothing 'cause there's no money".

And, lest we start getting overly hyperbolic about the T, it's worth noting that we're at least better off than WMATA down in DC, who found out about the nasty-nasty near-fatal flaw in their 7000 series after those things had displaced something like 60% of its entire fleet. Better to find and fix the problems when taking the new cars out of service is an annoyance rather than slashing or shutting down service altogether.
 
The MBTA is not testing the new trains long enough to be able to ward off and stop any problems that might've & already has surfaced. One car has a problem, & the whole fleet gets yanked off the tracks. The Red Line has only ONE new train, so far, & IT gets yanked. It is my utterly strong belief that they are just not giving the new vehicles more time in testing. Had they done this, then most of those problems more than likely wouldn't be happening.(n)
 
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Delay UP TO 10 MINUTES
Orange Line will be operating with longer headways due to limited trains. Trains were vandalized last night and repairs are in process. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to put trains into service as quickly as possible.

Pasted & copied this from the T's website. Now who in the Sam Hill would do something as horrible as THIS?!!! Yeah, now they don't have enough trains, since they yanked the new ones out of service again. It's almost like they're playing games with the new cars repeatedly! :eek::eek:
 
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Jahvon09 said:
Delay UP TO 10 MINUTES
Orange Line will be operating with longer headways due to limited trains. Trains were vandalized last night and repairs are in process. We apologize for the inconvenience and are working to put trains into service as quickly as possible.

Pasted & copied this from the T's website. Now who in the Sam Hill would do something as horrible as THIS?!!! Yeah, now they don't have enough trains, since they yanked the new ones out of service again. It' like they're playing games with the new cars repeatedly! :eek::eek:
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Except they were also running reduced service on the orange line the previous day as well, so something else may be going on.
 
Jahvon09 said:
The MBTA is not testing the new trains long enough to be able to ward off and stop any problems that might've & already has surfaced. One car has a problem, & the whole fleet gets yanked off the tracks. The Red Line has only ONE new train & IT gets yanked. It is my utterly strong belief that they are just not giving the new vehicles more time in testing. Had they done this, then most of those problems more than likely wouldn't be happening.(n)
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Except, just a moment ago, you were complaining that the new trains need to be returned to service sooner (not to mention all the posts about how we've been waiting too long for the new trains...).

Which do you want, more extended testing and thus no new trains in service, or new trains in service now so we can stop riding the "rust buckets"? Unless the MBTA has some new quantum tech I'm not familiar with, we can only choose one.

(And, I might add, choosing the latter could very well result in the former, or worse. See the notes above about DC...)
 
It's quite obvious now, that there are a lot of new cars, way too many to do at once.
Keep a new train in testing to make sure that it runs perfectly with no problems. Any new ones that night arise, note & document, then fix them. Every so often, swap out one for the other & keep doing that until they are all tested properly. Not hard to figure out.

Meanwhile, the GM of the T is being hammered about the problems that the T is having concerning the troubles.

(44) MBTA GM pressed for answers about recent troubles - YouTube
 
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Jahvon09 said:
It's quite obvious now, that there are a lot of new cars, way too many to do at once.
Keep a new train in testing to make sure that it runs perfectly with no problems. Any new ones that night arise, note & document, then fix them. Every so often, swap out one for the other & keep doing that until they are all tested properly. Not hard to figure out.
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That's...exactly...what...they...are...doing.

Each new delivery gets close to 2 months in testing before it's accepted into revenue service, and there are contractual requirements for "burn-in" miles to shake out the bugs. No...it's not foolproof. Some bugs pop up later than the shake-out testing can possibly uncover. That's why the whole car order is under intensive manufacturer warranty for the first couple years of revenue service. And that warranty is why the fleet gets pulled for inspection over seemingly minor things. This is all normal process. You're screaming and ranting about NORMAL processes.
 
notthemonthaugust said:
Except, just a moment ago, you were complaining that the new trains need to be returned to service sooner (not to mention all the posts about how we've been waiting too long for the new trains...).

Which do you want, more extended testing and thus no new trains in service, or new trains in service now so we can stop riding the "rust buckets"? Unless the MBTA has some new quantum tech I'm not familiar with, we can only choose one.

(And, I might add, choosing the latter could very well result in the former, or worse. See the notes above about DC...)
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Just so that you know, I'm not the only one who is gryping about the new trains constantly being yanked from service. The commuters don't like it either, & I don't blame them one bit! Some advocates are also ticked off & frustrated as well. And you wonder why the Feds are investigating the way that the MBTA is handling things. :mad:
 
New cars back in service: probably would've been hard to run full service on the Orange Line without these
1656955809629.png
 
TrolleybusFoaming said:
New cars back in service: probably would've been hard to run full service on the Orange Line without these
View attachment 26096
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I think that it would've been, considering that some of the old trains were retired from the OL. Still, the MBTA said that the Saturday schedule would run for most or all of the summer. :unsure:
New Orange Line train in service..jpg
 
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I'm having trouble finding an answer to this. Can anybody explain why the trains move so slow at least along the Braintree line? They can't be doing much more than 20 mph all the way through Quincy and up to South Station. I thought they redid all the ties on that line just a few years back. What is going on here? I do sure hope this is temporary, as it's absolutely pathetic the current state of our infrastructure.
 

General MBTA Topics (Multi Modal, Budget, MassDOT)

No idea where to post but learned of an mbta gift store on mass ave where I got an amazing wall decor (original sign is 6ft from decommissioned Quincy Adam’s station). Super excited! Is this Ward Maps by any chance? Great little store, lots of very cool maps too if you're into that sort of thing.
archboston.com

see discussion in the general topics thread here..
 
So, does each married pair use it's third rail shoe or does one shoe draw power for the whole train, and if it does, could two shoes be on at the same time?
 
Tallguy said:
So, does each married pair use it's third rail shoe or does one shoe draw power for the whole train, and if it does, could two shoes be on at the same time?
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This goes back since the beginning age of the electric train itself. As far as I know, & from watching ALL of the cars on an electric train draw power from the 3rd rail through a train stop at the old Northampden Street Station, when I was a boy, all the shoes at each 4-wheel bogie on both sides of the cars got power all at once. It's the same way even today. I'm just so glad that THIS latest fire incident wasn't blamed on any of the new cars, otherwise they'd have found another excuse to yank them from service again!!!! :)
 
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